Carrington Ward writes a thoughtful reply to my posting and mostly uses
George Kennan's views to comment on the role of John Service.  Fair
enough, although it is my understanding that Kennan at the time (that is,
the 1940s) was largely oblivious to the illegal activities of Service and
others.  His considered opinion years later is interesting, but not
particularly pertinent to the primary evidentiary question that was posed
by Professor Moise.  Moreover, much of the evidence that I cited was not,
to my knowledge, public at the time that Kennan wrote his memoirs.  So he
very well probably did not know the extent of Service's culpability, nor
about the cover-up by the Truman Administration, when he wrote that book.
Whether he would change his mind today, or whether he has seen the
evidence, I do not know.

I am fully aware that I am among those few who write against the torrent
of, to paraphrase Thomas Kuhn, "normal history" of the Cold War, that is,
against the reigning received wisdom.  But one must go where one's
inquiries lead, and by taking on the myth of the "China Hands" and their
allegedly prescient advice, I am not simply being contrarian (although I
have a tendency in this direction.)  I am convinced that we are reading
their role in the history of the period largely incorrectly, and that this
erroneous reputation is reinforcing unfortunate trends in current
intellectual fashions and public policies.  I will explain further below.

There were two questions posed by Professor Moise, the first empirical and
the second judgmental: 1) was John Service observed leaking classified
materials under FBI surveillance; and 2) was he a "fellow traveler"?
Moise incorrectly answered the first question "no," or to be more fair,
"not proven," which apparently in part led him to negatively assess the
second question.  I offered evidence that answered the first question
affirmatively that therefore, I believe, answers the second question
affirmatively also.  As I pointed out, this is not self-evident because of
the murkiness of the terminology and offered some opinions on what a
"fellow traveler" actually is in this case and more generally.  One can
agree or disagree, but I do not see how Ward's posting alters or affects
anything about this evidentiary question in any important way.

Ward's form of argumentation appears to be similar to the final third of a
sequence of those who think that there was little problem with leaking
information in this era generally (usually because they too are critical
of the then-existing policy): first they deny it took place (or in
Professor Moise's case on China, question whether it took place), then
where it can be shown that it did, it is argued that it did not really
matter or was trivial information, and then where it can be argued that it
likely very well mattered, it is argued that "everyone does it."  In this
final vein, Ward offers the following:

"But, of course, to the extent that Service's crime was leaking documents
and attempting to influence the government from outside the dissent
channel, it resembled the Casablanca-esque crime of gambling: the degree
of leakage in favor of the Chiang government was probably equivalent, as
was the treasonous channeling of restricted documents."

Ward uses a nifty bit of euphemism here: illegally releasing highly
sensitive documents to people in the process of setting up an espionage
ring, even if Service was not aware of this process, becomes merely
influencing the government "outside the dissent channel."  Of course
leaking takes place, especially in democratic societies.  Offering an
opinion to a journalist in this regard is one thing, perhaps bad judgment
(especially if the journalist turns out to be untrustworthy) but hardly
treasonous, as in the recent tragic case of Dr. David Kelly in Great
Britain.  But illegally leaking classified documents to undermine existing
policy proactively during general wartime, it seems to me, is quite
another.

It is not my contention that the Right was right and the Left was wrong
here.  It is that US China policy was rendered incoherent by the
polarization of policy along ideological lines, and, secondarily and
therefore, that the legendary status that the "China Hands" have in Asian
Studies, and even worse policy, circles and elsewhere is largely
undeserved.

A recent history of WW II makes this point nicely: the "New Deal" Left and
the traditional bureaucracy and foreign policy experts (which included
Kennan, by the way) were at odds ideologically throughout the war, more so
as it progressed, and this affected policy greatly and detrimentally.
One can see the dilemma in Soviet policy: when a group of "New Dealers"
apparently grossly overestimated the chances for reaching an amicable
agreement with the Soviets based on generous gestures and amicable
feelings from the shared sacrifice of the war, as well as the alleged
emerging ideological "convergence" between democracy and communism, and
were backed by FDR, experts such as Kennan and Loy Henderson thought this
policy really ridiculous, not just wrong but ridiculous.  Yet to my
knowledge they, nor anyone else of consequence that was against this
policy, did not leak highly classified information to a sympathetic press
organ in order to undermine official policy.  If they had, or did, they
should be as roundly condemned as the "China Hands."  It is called
professionalism.  A parallel ideological development took place in China
policy, except the communists were not yet in power, so the ideological
disagreement took a different form.  It especially got nasty as victory
approached, and I think the *Amerasia* case is part and parcel of this.
[See Thomas Fleming, *The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World
War II* (Basic Books, 2001) for the basic argument.]

It might also be noted that the "China Hands" officially and
controversially released highly classified information in a highly
selective fashion in the State Department "China White Paper" of August,
1949 (largely written by John Melby, considered a "China Hand"), more to
cover themselves than to explain policy, Chiang's American defenders said.
This, of course, was perfectly legal, but the documents in it also
displayed a set of attitudes about China policy among some American
diplomats on the China desk that can be read to reinforce the charges of
earlier bias (what the economists call "revealed preferences.")  At least
that is how they were interpreted at the time.  People who challenged the
document's selectivity of declassification, and they were hardly all
McCarthyites, had no comparable public instrument of debate to which to
turn.

Therefore Ward's charge about the leaking of classified documents by
Chiang's American defenders is interesting.  Could Carrington Ward give us
chapter and verse on people leaking "restricted documents" in an
equivalent amount and sensitivity "in favor of the Chiang government,"
especially in the early period (1944-1948)?  This very well may be true,
but I have seen no such evidence and would be keenly interested in knowing
who, how, when, and why for my research.  Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

Should we hold the "China Hands" accountable for the world class bloodshed
that the communists subsequently inflicted on China in peacetime?  No, I
do not think that would be entirely fair, even for those like Service and
Fairbank who clearly desired a communist victory in the civil war and
despicably defended the regime's policies even after the Great Leap
Forward (17-30 million dead by official Chinese government estimates,) any
more than I think that we can give them credit for predicting confidently
that the communists would win the civil war.  And Carrington Ward is
right, we do not know what would have happened if the CCP had lost,
whether it would have resulted in the *relatively* benign style of
dictatorship that one saw after 1950 on Taiwan (and that eventually
allowed the development of democracy), the return of warlordism, or a
brutal quasi-fascist dictatorship under Chiang.  It is always difficult to
predict what Chiang would have done on the mainland in peacetime since his
entire history there was only that of a civil and/or international war
leader (even the so-called "Nanking Decade" from 1927-37 was characterized
by warlordism, uprisings, and a communist insurgency, not to mention
external Japanese pressures after 1931.)  What he would have done in
peacetime without internal insurgencies or external threats from Japan and
the Soviet Union is an interesting counterfactual to ponder.

But we can make such an empirical wartime/peacetime comparison with Mao
and his cohorts, and the results should be, to say the least, depressing
by any measurement for those who thought communism "best" for China,
running into tens of millions dead in peacetime.  Surely we cannot simply
overlook that murderous result, throw up our hands, and say, "oops!"
Yet, to my knowledge, "China Hands" such as Service and Fairbank never
recanted, never really comprehended the disaster that had fallen upon
China with Maoism.  We probably could have done nothing feasible to stop
the communist victory in China (that is what I have unexceptionally argued
in my previous book,) but that does not mean we should remain morally
neutral about that event and celebrate those among us who naively desired
it, as opposed to those who sadly accepted it.

For Service and other "China Hands"  to misinterpret or misinform the
government and others as to the nature of the communist movement in China,
to portray them as more Jeffersonian agrarian reformers than Stalinist
stalwarts when there was much evidence, including the Chinese Communists'
own repeated protestations that this was not true, publically and to US
officials (outside of the "Dixie Mission," which documentary evidence now
shows was cleverly strung along in this liberal charade as part of CCP
policy,)  and to act illegally upon those convictions because they
believed that it was "best" for the China they "knew so well" is behavior
that should be neither praised nor tolerated, never mind lionized.
Particularly with the ultimate results of communist rule.  In my view, it
must be condemned.

This is not an arcane historical argument, but has potential consequences
for current policymaking, in the war against terrorism in the Middle East,
Southeast Asia, and elsewhere.  The "China Hands" read the communist
movement there almost exclusively in indigenous cultural and historical
terms, as regional specialists tend to do more generally.  In doing so,
they underestimated and misunderstood the ideological, internationalist
aspect of the movement that might have helped them predict the murderous
policies that were to come when the regime took power.  It was not all
culture and history, any more than it was all ideology and power.  The
culturalists were half right in China; but so were those who emphasized
leninist ideology in understanding Mao and his cohorts.  Yet having
largely cast off economic and ideological determinism, American academics,
and particularly those in regional studies and/or those enamored of the
"cultural turn" of "post-modernism," are again in danger of slipping into
a kind of cultural determinism and its resulting moral relativism, which
is as dangerously reductionist as any other form of determinism.  In this
the "China Hands" are celebrated as progenitors and prophets of cultural
explanations of behavior.  How their simultaneous facile projection of
American ideological norms on to a leninist movement in China, thus
rendering it both psychologically benign and politically acceptable, came
about from those who allegedly knew that country and people so well is
almost beyond comprehension in retrospect, is generally overlooked in the
iterature, and is more grist for the mill of a psychologist than a
political scientist.  This is true even by their own culturalist
assumptions.

Forgive them their blunders, yes.  But honor and emulate them?  We should
not.

Doug Macdonald
Colgate University

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS